Incompetence - first post on post-college life
Home is a state of mind. Living in a new place is like a new
relationship—it takes getting used to.
You’re excited but you’re not quite comfortable; it takes work to think
of it as your own. When the new
place is your first, you have to get every little thing you’ll need (the
relationship analogy no longer holds).
Hangers. Coasters. A whisk. You’ll be fine without them, sure, but come the night you
need one, and suddenly you’re unsettled at the reminder of how very new this
place is. It’s not college:
nothing’s provided. Home takes
development.
A
new setting doesn’t help. City
life—even a “training wheels” city like Boston—to a neophyte like me is
tiring. It’s exhausting how many
people there are, living, talking, working, walking, talking, biking, talking. The
suburbs of my past had a silent, solipsistic solitude to them—here I’m
constantly reminded how freaking busy everyone is all the time. It’s like a stress mirror. I’m too new to avert my eyes so I’m
constantly looking at everything and everyone and walking faster and faster to
avoid theirs and catch up to the city’s pace.
My
apartment is a haven, a little bubble where it’s quiet and still and no one
barges unexpectedly through my line of vision. I’m not worried about anyone overhearing my singing, or at
least I’m not worried about judgmental glances. Coming home is a release from the effort that is
self-presentation in the public world.
I strip off the performative aspect of existence and simply am. Arriving to that asylum at the end of a
long day, I get the first inkling that this is home.
I’m
carrying the trophies of my post-grad life: groceries. I clutch the bags in
each hand, symbols of my ability to feed myself, both financially and literally. After the years of being spoiled by
dining halls and parents, I reached the “adult” world concerned about
cooking. Yet following recipes and
finding time to make them is far easier than expected—aided considerably by
Trader Joe’s frozen delights. It’s
shopping that’s proved stressful—I never realized how much time I’d have to
spend planning what to buy, going to the store, and returning, lugging with me the
hard-won evidence of my competent adulthood. Only then can I think about actually cooking.
Tonight,
I won’t get to. For though I stand
outside my new apartment with the fruits of my labor, I have lost my most
valuable possessions. There is no
feeling of impotence like reaching for your keys and coming up
empty-handed. You stare befuddled
as the friendly door that keeps you safe becomes an impassable barrier, a mundane
wrist-turn replaced by a night of searching and frustration. Where my building and apartment keys
fell from their ring I’ll never know, but I do know that this is the moment I
realize that I love my new apartment.
Only when it is barred to me, with its too-hot water, hard-to-control
temperature, more-than-occasional roach cameos and complete and utter lack of
cell reception (which I’d laugh off as a first-world problem, were it not for
the sobering fact that calling 911 would require exiting the building and
courtyard and finding a pocket of signal on the street…which, you know, might
not cut it in a situation requiring 911), do I realize how much I yearn for my
incomplete set of kitchen chairs and the frozen mac and cheese patiently waiting
in my small freezer.
It
goes without saying that my roommate is out of town. Losing one’s keys must, by
law (dammit, Murphy!), come at the most inconvenient time. For example, this
summer I chose a day when my then-roommate wasn’t merely out of town but out of
state. In that incident—in a true
testament to my college education—I walked out the door sans wallet, phone or keys, leaving myself with literally
nothing at my disposal. Did I
mention that I was living in a sub-let and wasn’t on the lease? At least this time there’s proof I
inhabit the apartment I need to enter.
There is little proof that I deserve to.
Anyway, my college-trained mind
quickly realizes that I can’t call campus police to let me into my room…I doubt
Boston P.D. would react well to a request to “let a man into a locked
apartment.” I feel completely
unable to make it in the “real world.”
I mean, it’s not a good sign to be stressed about things that literally
every independent human being does: buying food, preparing it, entering and
leaving a place of residence... Fittingly,
I can’t even lie down defeated on my bed or console myself with a carton of
store-brand ice cream.
The
next afternoon I find myself sitting in an antiseptic testing room, taking the
GRE. (I called my
superintendent—like an ADULT—and he more than lived up to his prefix. Also, yes, I locked myself out the
night before a major exam. Murphy.)
To be frank, it’s a stupid test.
Why I need to prove my ability (or lack thereof) to recall math I
learned in 10th grade in order to go to graduate school is beyond
me, but I’ve been a scholastic dancing monkey as long as I can remember, and
here I sit, tapping along. The
test is long and exhausting and feels more oppressive than any I have taken
because I know precisely what percent of my monthly salary it costs. But it’s just a test. Weirdly, I’m in my comfort zone,
writing persuasive essays for bored TAs and answering questions about passages
from obscure textbooks. It’s college
all over again. Way easier than
holding onto my keys.
I
guess sometimes that’s the way these things go. I literally have the rest of my life to figure out the
little necessities of navigating this oh-so-real world. I knew the new apartment would be a
transition, and I knew that a liberal arts education definitely didn’t prepare
me for living on my own. But it
does prepare me to write snarky, self-deprecating blog posts on meta-mundanity,
so here we are. Now excuse me, I
need to heat up dinner.
